Answer each of the following questions. Each answer is graded on 10. Aim for five well-developed points per answer. Quote from the works so support your points. When quoting, use the MLA citation format.
1. Many of thewriters and poets we have studied seek to redefine traditional notions of beauty, Discuss how Yeats in “Easter 1916,” Purdy in “The Country North of Belleville” and, especially, Ondaatje in “The Gate in His Head” presentalternative images and conceptions of Beauty. If you like, you can also discuss Owen's decision to beautify his poetry, A.J.M. Smith’s “The Lonely Land,” or any other works in the course manual that explore this topic.
Yeats in “Easter 1916” describes, “A terrible beauty is born” (16 40 80) three times in it. The speaker uses it to emphasize that Irish’s independence from British needs a huge number of people going on to a no back road. This beauty accompanies people’s deaths.
In Purdy’s “The Country North of Belleville,” the beauty is naturalized. The nation’s beauty possesses the fertilized soil and hard-worked citizens. Mountains, lands, rivers, stone, and farm animals all increase the degree of the beauty in the country. This kind of beauty comes from the nature and it belongs to nature.
In “The Gate in His Head,” Ondaatje says,
“The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment
so they are shapeless, awkward
moving to the clear”(25-27),
he celebrates blurring images. This kind of beauty is differentfrom both “the terrible beauty” in Yeats “Easter 1916” and a natural beauty in Purdy’s “The Country North of Belleville. The beauty is vague in Ondaatje’s“The Gate in His Head” and to be caught in the moment. It means everything is not perfect forever,so a person like the writer himself.
